Comcast shut off our service last Thursday because I canceled. We've had our 802.11g router running on the 7Mbit/s DSL line for a week with no major issues, so the timing was fine. I bought a TV antenna so we could watch Ugly Betty that night. After a solid thirty minutes of increasingly abstract interpretative dance with the rabbit ears, we finally found an antenna position which wasn't too objectionable. There was ghosting, but not a ton of ghosting. There was static, but not a ton of static. There were color issues, but not a ton of color issues. It was the worse-is-better solution of the 50s.

Then, on Friday, Amber tried making the streaming video on Fox.com and NBC.com really big. Really big. Like TV-sized big. It works great. We plugged her laptop into the TV, set the websites for fullscreen, and watched a ton of streaming TV over the internet.

I think I counted two instances where the buffer ran dry during approximately four hours of television viewing. There weren't any digital artifacts. One network shows two 30 second commercials during the commercial breaks, the other relies solely on banner ads and doesn't have commercial breaks. The quality is better than the quality Comcast was delivering, because Comcast mostly has the broadcast channels as analog so we experience ghosting in our house. Also, we get far more digital problems (artifacts/black screen) per hour with Comcast than with internet streaming.

There's basically three issues to resolve now. First, we need a couch-accessible interface. Getting up once or twice an hour to change the show might have been acceptable in the 50s, but nowadays we are a little bit wiser and lazier. I'm thinking a presentation-style wireless mouse with little joystick will do the trick.

Second, we need to get back perhaps 50-75 pixels on the edge of the TV show: black on the edges and OS X/Firefox on the top. I'm hoping Firefox or OS X has the mojo to make this happen.

Third, we probably need to invest in a dedicated box so Amber doesn't have to sacrifice her laptop to the god of television. My first thought is a hacked Apple TV so we can run Firefox. At $229 that's a tough price point to beat. Are there other options in that price range or cheaper?

This isn't exactly the appletv price point, but for a little bit more you can get a mac mini. Geeks has a special: http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/110666 that includes a wireless keyboard and mouse. The mac mini provides a very nice all-in-one since it also acts like a dvd player. I used to have a friend who had this setup with his hdtv a while back and it was great.

Also there are "other" ways of getting tv shows about two hours after they air. That works for any shows that aren't streaming.

I use newsgroups still to download tv shows in (in don't even know what format) 720 typically. Of course I end up watching them mostly on my computer but that's because my tv sucks (32" 480). When I did use my old 1Ghz laptop to play stuff on the tv it would croak/stutt on higher bit-rate stuff.

You guys are missing the essential point which is streaming TV from the networks' websites is like Comcast On Demand, but free. You don't have to queue up your torrents/usenet transfers and then watch them several hours later.

my only experience with streaming TV was through NBC.com which wasn't bad since they usually had shows the day after it aired on TV. However, the quality wasn't the greatest (the video was too dark and player they used [probably some variant of flash player] had no way to adjust brightness =( ) and if you can stand the same freakin' commercial looping over and over again during breaks it's ok. For me I'd rather wait till a season is done, get the whole thing and watch it in mini marathons...unless you just gotta find out what happens next!